Travel is an art not a science. That's why people are flocking to sunny suburban Liverpool today where Mendips, John Lennon's home for 18 of his 40 years, affords an extraordinary insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's heroes. As Yoko Ono said: 'When children say "I only have a small bedroom, what can I achieve?", they should come here and see how the thing that changed the world's culture so profoundly was nurtured in this smallest bedroom.'

John's is one of three bedrooms in his Aunt Mimi's pebble-dashed mock Tudor 'semi', which can now be witnessed in its 1950s art deco/art nouveau glory after it was opened to the public yesterday following restoration by the National Trust. John lived there from the age of five, from 1945 to 1963.

As you stand in this tiny room, looking out over the typical UK suburban street, you try to imagine what a young John might have imagined on the same spot. Songs written here led him to play to packed houses across the globe; to spark hysterical screams by simply announcing one - 'Please Please Me', 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' 'Love Me Do' - to meet prime ministers, presidents and monarchs; and to be shot dead by a celebrity obsessive in New York.

The cream wallpapered room covers about three by six metres, with Elvis bill posters ('After hearing "Heartbreak Hotel", nothing was the same for me') and pictures of Rita Hayworth and Brigitte Bardot on the walls. However, the National Trust might alter the decor as relatives have questioned whether the redoubtable Mimi would have allowed John 'women on the walls'.

At the head of the bed is a speaker, with classic postwar sunrise wood cut over the mesh, equivalent to the one John wired up to the wireless downstairs to play his favourite Lonnie Donegan, Tessie O'Shea and classical music tunes from the BBC.

On a tiny table nestling in the bow windows sit a few of John's favourite books. He wrote: 'I was just passionate about Alice in Wonderland and drew all the characters.

'I did poems in the style of the Jabberwocky.'

Indeed, when he was worried about Mimi seeing his diary he developed a style of gobbledygook that may have prefigured his more surreal lyrics ('Now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall', 'Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye'). Also present are Richmal Crompton's Just William ('I wrote my own Just William stories with me doing all the things') and Wind in the Willows. It's easy to under stand the importance of music and literature to a creative mind in a room that can scarcely accommodate a rock'n'roll drum kit.

In the dining room - at one time John's art studio - hangs a photograph from 1957. A 16-year-old John's eyes stare straight at the camera, guitar casually cradled like an extension of his body, playing at the St Peter's church fete with his group the Quarry Men. The 15-year-old Paul McCartney was watching and struck up a friendship with John that would spawn the most famous part nership in pop. Aunt Mimi heard the 'racket' at the fete too, and later told him: 'The guitar's all right as a hobby, but you'll never make a living from it.' But Mimi's value was not in her music criticism.

Mimi looked after John between the ages of five and 23, after his mother, Julia, felt incapable of doing so, and supported him through several personal crises, including Julia's death in 1958. Even aged 23, John was taking over the dining room as a bedroom with his wife Cynthia and their new born son Julian. Mimi was a strict disciplinarian, tidy and with sharp hearing - John used to recollect his difficulty as a teenager in tiptoeing out of the house and back of an evening - but she was also 'his rock', keeping him on the straight and narrow, and cooking him his favourite egg and chips. 'This was a happy place for him in a way... a lot of tragedies happened outside,' says Yoko.

Because of Mendips' small size, visitors will be taken by minibus to look around it in combination with another National Trust property: 20 Forthlin Road, where Paul McCartney spent his childhood.

That Paul emerged from lower down Britain's notorious social pecking order may strike the casual observer as strange. And fans of John's 'Working Class Hero' might be surprised to see that Mendips has a servants' bellboard - although there were no servants while John lived there.

But John was clear: 'I was a nice clean-cut suburban boy,' he once said. When he became famous Mimi would berate him for his mannerisms but he used to say 'that's showbusiness, they want me to speak more Liverpool'.

'Looking back, it was an extraordinary thing to go from such a conventional family setup into rock'n'roll,' reflects his cousin Michael Cadwallader, who helped advise on how the house looked.

But the Fifties was an extraordinary decade. Nothing about the Anaglypta wallpaper, beige-tiled electric fireplaces, patterned curtains, lead glass bow windows with floral art-nouveau stained glass inserts and Singer sewing machines appears to predict the fluorescent, flared, drug-and-sex open decadence of the Sergeant Pepper days just 10 years hence.

But the wireless in the morning room playing The Goon Show , whose nonsense voices John loved to mimic, gives you a hint of rebellious action fomenting within this straight-laced milieu. 'You may say that I'm a dreamer,' he later wrote in his 1971 peace anthem 'Imagine' - unabashed, as he already knew how far dreams could take you.

Perhaps it is strange that Yoko entrusted the house of this famous rebel, who scathingly refers in 'Happiness is a Warm Gun' to a man donating the 'sole confession' of his wife to the National Trust, to such an 'establishment' organisation. [CORRECTION, 04.01.05: It was, in fact, a 'soap impression' of his wife...] 'He'd be thinking of them as a very responsible, not a stuffy, parent,' she responded. 'If he's looking at it now I'm sure he's having a great laugh.'

Yoko bought the house when she heard that a private company planned to turn it into a hotel with John's bedroom as a honeymoon suite. She recalled being spellbound by the houses of Schubert, Beethoven and Mozart and resolved to afford Lennon's fans the same opportunity.

Peach face powder, Horlicks mugs, astringent medicated toilet tissue, china collections, frosted glass and lino are just a few of the pertinent touches achieved by the National Trust. If, like John, this Fifties stuffiness leaves you needing a cigarette ('And curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid git'), You'll have to go into the large, turfed garden, replete with soft fruit bushes and fruit trees which once fuelled Mimi's baking proclivities.

The porch of the house could just fit John and Paul strumming their guitars standing up, and was 'out of the house' enough for Mimi to encourage them to do so. The tiled floor and glass panels created the boomy 'bathroom' acoustic the lads coveted, and here they practised and germinated songs such as 'Please Please Me', 'I Call Your Name' and 'I'll Get You'.

As they became hits in 1963, John left Mendips for Kensington, London, and Beatlemania took off. But as I left, my mind was jumbled with later songs such as the surrealist 'I am the Walrus' and the elegies 'Julia' and 'In My Life' - songs that took longer to surface, but still so clearly had their roots right here under the blue suburban skies.

More information

The National Trust (0870 900 0256) offers The Birthplace of The Beatles: Mendips and 20 Forthlin Road Tour from Wednesday to Sunday, twice a day from Albert Dock (0151 708 8574) or Speke Hall ( 0151 427 7231). Tickets cost £10 adults, £5 members and accompanied children go free.

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